James Franco Full Frontal NuditySomeone sent me this link, and since it’s Labor Day Weekend I thought I would share. Can’t post the photos here on this blog, but the link is safe and it works very well.

Hotness career student, and all around renaissance man James Franco derives many a pleasure from teasing his gay and straight fans alike. We will never forget his Flaunt derriere cover and be forever grateful for it.

But this here photo is one of the best-est gift that could be extended to his legions of fans worldwide. See more pics of Franco after the jump!

Franco is no stranger to nudity on screen – Milk pool scene immediately jumps to mind – but full frontal has alluded all of us waiting for the final frontier to be showcased. Some lucky shutter-bug, however, apparently caught this very missing link while Franco aired out his family jewels on some beach, reaping the benefits some of us would pay a hefty price to witness first hand.

This photo actually supports one of my theories about male full frontal nudity in films, and with well known actors. It’s obvious James Franco has nothing to hide, but this could be the reason why we don’t see more full frontal nudity with male actors. I know they can make it look real with stand-ins. However, no man wants to go there unless it’s absolutely necessary.

Stand-ins are not good for the ego.

Cory Booker Looking For Gay Vote?

There’s been some talk recently about the NJ Democratic candidate running for the Senate, Cory Booker, and whether or not he’s gay. I posted this earlier this week. It was the topic of discussion in a few places I went yesterday. And now it seems he’s being accused of being ambiguous about whether or not he’s gay so he can allegedly snatch up the gay vote.

The Senate campaign of Newark Mayor Cory Booker said his Republican rival was “bigoted” for saying that Booker was “acting ambiguous” in an effort to attract gay votes.Booker’s team was reacting to comments by Republican Steve Lonegan, a conservative who is trailing badly in polls.Lonegan, who is known for his blunt style, seemed to raise old rumors that Booker might be gay and told the conservative Newsmax TV that recent Booker comments where he said he doesn’t care if people do think he is gay because “I want to challenge people on their homophobia” were “weird.”This entire discussion just shows how little the mainstream actually knows about gay men, and how the gay stereotype is perpetuated all the time. It seems to be a given that all gay men are liberal Democrats, as if this is part of their birthright. And just because Cory Booker is a liberal Democrat who gay men “think” might be gay they will run out in droves to the voting booths just for that alone. And that’s just not how it works.

The fact is not all gay men are liberal Democrats. Personally, I’m an independent. Not all gay men vote according to a candidate’s sexuality. If I still lived in New Jersey I probably would vote for Cory Booker. But not because he “could” be gay, or because he’s a Democrat. It’s because I’ve seen what he’s accomplished in the city of Newark and I’d like to see someone in Washington who can get results like that.

Instead of adding a link to the other post about the release of this book, I wanted to mention something for those who think indie publishing is simple in a separate post. This book was uploaded to Amazon around six o’clock this morning and I just received an e-mail verification that it went live a few minutes ago. Thankfully, Smashwords and allromanceebooks.com were faster to deal with. This is also why it’s so hard to pinpoint an actual release time unless you have a web site of your own and sell the books from there.

Each year the jurors who are part of the rainbow awards work very hard reading and rating books, so when I saw this note of thanks today I asked if I could have permission to post it here on the blog so readers can see what’s going on behind the scenes. I have one good friend who I know is reading at least eight books, and others are reading even more. And it’s nice to see that all this hard work is helping a cause in the long term.

From my inbox:

Dear Jury,

I really want to thank you for all you have done and are doing, reading for the past 6 months, reading all the last minute entries, and be willing to read for the October/November for more than what you have initially agreed. That means a lot, but not only for the Rainbow Awards and the authors, that means that we were able to raise almost 6.000 dollars, and since my input is to not spend a lot of money to print the certificates to the winners (I’m sure they will be more than happy with a nice paper to frame), most of them will go to charity. I want to give you a feeling of what YOU have achieved: with $150 Ali Forney center provides temporary shelter to a kid for one week; with $500 a week they connect with these youth through Outreach Services, which include safe sex education, counseling, and services to help them off of the streets. I’m sure you are proud that we will be able to give them help.

Again, THANK YOU, Elisa

Racism on Big Brother 15 Confronted

I’ve posted about racism and gaycist comments on the TV reality show Big Brother before this summer, and what’s been happening on Big Brother 15 this season seems to continue to devolve into a display of bullying and hate from certain individual players, Aaryn Gries and Amanda Zuckerman being two of the biggest bullies and racists in the house. There are others. In this article titled, Big Brother 15: A Cesspool of Homophobia and Racism you can read more. For those who don’t know what a cesspool is, that’s where waste water and human waste goes for people who live in rural areas. It’s a dated term, because most have septic tanks, but it’s also an appropriate example of what’s been happening in BB15 this season.

And you have to understand that these people know they are being filmed 24 hours a day, nonstop. So it’s either arrogance or stupidity or a combination of both.

Last night I watched the live eviction show and Aaryn Gries was finally voted out of the house, which meant she had to face Julie Chen at the end of the show before a live studio audience. I have to admit that I’ve been waiting for that all summer. Some of the shows were so vicious I had tears in my eyes. The moment Aaryn Gries walked out on the stage there was a mixed reaction from the audience, to which she didn’t seem to react at first. Julie Chen asked the usual questions she normally asks each contest who has been voted off, and then she went into a few questions about Aaryn’s racist comments that I won’t mention here on this blog. You can see them yourself here.

CBS has little choice but to air the comments during the shows, since the situations are seen and heard on the show’s live feed. The comments spread like wildfire over Twitter and other social media. The repercussions outside of the house are unknown to the house guests, but jobs have been lost and some people are clearly making their lives after the show more difficult.

The most interesting thing is that none of the players who have made the racial and anti-gay slurs have any idea what’s been happening outside the Big Brother house all summer. Several have been fired from their jobs, and one was close to being fired last I’d read, as a result of this racism. And from what I saw last night by the way Aaryn reacted, she’s in for a few more surprises when the season is over and she goes back home to Texas. At one point in last night’s show she even blamed her comments on being from Texas, which I didn’t buy at all. I know plenty of people who live in Texas and they aren’t racists.

And what’s going on with Amanda and that boyfriend of hers isn’t worthy of posting anywhere. You have to wonder that if Amanda is the way she is openly, and her boyfriend on the show seems to support her, does that make him any less of a bully than she is?

As a side note, Julie Chen, an Asian American, handled the interview with Aaryn as a true professional, especially considering the fact that some of Aaryn’s comments were directed toward Asian Americans.

Today is the release day of my recent anthology, The Women Who Love to Love Gay Romance. When I began this project last January and put out the call for submissions I knew it wouldn’t be a fast book to release. In other words, I wanted to take my time, gather the right stories and authors, and put together a book that will hopefully be entertaining and interesting for everyone. Each story has a strong plot, and each one is markedly different from the other. I’ve already written several posts about the book as things have cropped up since January, and here’s a link to most of them.

In celebration of the release day for The Women Who Love to Love Gay Romance, I’d like to post a few excerpts from some of the stories. I still don’t have a link yet to Amazon because it takes a while for the book to go live. But I will update when I get one very soon.

From Changing Curses by Li Blaine

By the time she turned sixteen, new carts buckled and broke the instant she placed her hand on them. By eighteen, each and every horse she mounted stumbled and became lame. At twenty-three, the weather found her and dried the fields. Crops withered during the harvest and streams flooded during the winter. The village was near starvation when Ilya finally set off alone. The sandy mountains of the outland became her home. Food was scarce and weight fell from her bones but still she lived. For years, she watched from the dusty hillside as life returned to the community, knowing she’d been to blame for what they had suffered.

From The Facilitator by Tilly Hunter

I work from home, drawing up designs for fancy dress costumes for a movie merchandising company. Jake is staying at my apartment temporarily while he looks for a new place. But the way things are going, he’ll be moving in with his fella Will before long. I’ll miss the company, but I’ll be glad to stop hiding my romance books. I don’t know why I hide them, really. I’m sure I wouldn’t if they were straight-up erotica, but they’re not. Generally they’re kinky man-on-man smut; sometimes with fangs.

From The Courage to Jump by Oleander Plume

Lucy Larson was the pen name of one Brenda Suggins, age thirty, graduate of Merck County Community College, with a certificate in interior design. Which wasn’t even worth the paper it was printed on since the closest thing she ever came to an interior design job was working in the drapery department at Sears. Instead, Brenda was a bank clerk by day and the secret writer of gay erotica by night. Her latest series, Brothers of the Crescent Moon, was very popular among young gay men, but lately, even more of her readers were heterosexual females. Reading about the exploits of two hot, long haired, muscular werewolves really got some women hot. The latest book in the series was highly anticipated and had already sold two thousand copies in pre-sales.

Lucy started writing erotica for fun, then at the urging of an old boyfriend (who later turned out to be gay) she sent one of her short stories to a publisher and her career took off from there. Of course only Lucy’s publisher and her old boyfriend knew about her secret life. She kept it well hidden from friends and relatives. She couldn’t even imagine the reaction she would get from her mother if she knew she was writing about gay sex. No, she could imagine and it was pretty ugly.

Miss Richfield in Philly

When I saw this on my local Philadelphia news channel last night I figured I would share with links. For those who don’t know who Miss Richfield is, he’s a well known female impersonator I first saw about twelve or thirteen years ago in Provincetown at the Crown and Anchor, and I’ve been following his act ever since. I don’t typically follow that sort of thing unless it’s something I think is really good. And for me that sort of entertainment is only good when it’s done with camp, satire, and is so over the top you know you’re not supposed to take it seriously. All you’re supposed to do is have fun watching it. It really is an art.

In any event, there’s a new TV commercial out where Miss Richfield is marketing toward the LGBT community to visit Philadelphia. The first time Miss Richfield did this was in 2004.

“Ten years ago, Philadelphia was proud to officially ‘come out’ as a gay-friendly destination when we invited LGBT travelers to visit,” said Meryl Levitz, president and CEO of GPTMC. “With our new commercial, we’re going beyond our history roots and reiterating our invitation, celebrating both the city’s evolution into a premier destination and the LGBT community’s progress over the last decade.”

In the new 30-second spot, titled “Miss Richfield’s Selfie Tour of Philadelphia,” the flamboyant Miss Richfield 1981 embarks on a Philadelphia tour, visiting landmarks all over the city while snapping photos of herself-and some new buff friends-along the way. While wearing her red-white-and-blue, she starts at Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell; runs the Rocky steps yelling “Yo, Adrian!” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; admires the views along the Schuylkill River; dines alfresco over food and wine; dances at a crowded nightclub; and finally, collapses onto a hotel room bed.

I’m only posting a reminder that tomorrow, August 30th, is the release date for the anthology, The Women Who Love to Love Gay Romance. I’ll post more tomorrow about it in detail, with a few excerpts, too. (Contributing authors, I will be in touch with you very soon with copies.)

And when I say that tomorrow is the release date, please take into consideration that I don’t know a specific time when it will go live on Amazon. The book will be distributed in many places, but I like to put it on Amazon first because that’s where I usually get most of my feedback. And I’m never exactly certain when it will go live after it’s uploaded to Kindle. As soon as I have links, I’ll put them up on tomorrow’s post.

Freedom to Marry

I’ve been posting about the Freedom to Marry organization for a long time now. You can read those posts here. In many ways Freedom to Marry has been my own personal catharsis because I’m living in PA where gay marriage is still not legal and my twenty year relationship with Tony has not been recognized like those in other states since the SCOTUS ruling. And not even in my own home town where I always thought the LGBT community set examples for others.

It’s been a disillusioning week for all gay couples in New Hope, and what surprises me even more is that there are some gay people who are supporting the mayor’s decision not to buck an immoral law and not to fight for equality to be on the right side of history. That kind of mind set just blows me away because it’s political and not emotional. This is the main reason why I decided not to go to law school after I graduated from college and took my LSATs. When it comes to things like this I don’t support or respect every single law, and I believe there are certain laws that need to be changed.

This is the latest from Freedom to Marry

This week has seen a flurry of activity supporting the freedom to marry in New Mexico. Three counties in New Mexico have been ordered by district court judges to end marriage discrimination and begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. County clerks in three additional counties have followed the lead of these rulings by issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in their own counties. These huge steps forward in New Mexico this week bring renewed urgency to why we need the freedom to marry uniformly across the state – and, ultimately, why we need the freedom to marry nationwide.

I get interesting e-mails all the time from companies all over the world. Some I even like posting about with permission from the companies that send these e-mails. In this case I’m talking about mensunderwearstore.com, where they carry a line of underwear that’s different from other places I’ve seen. The prices are not bad at all, and I own a few pairs myself.

From my inbox:

The MensUnderwearStore.com team of photo experts recently shot Ryan Bertroche on location in St. Louis, MO. A native of Iowa, Ryan broke a sweat and kept things sizzling with his looks that resemble a young Kurt Russell. In addition to modeling the new Calvin Klein Athletic collection, Ryan also wore items from the Under Denim, Dry Touch and Fresh & Bright collections from Diesel.

Here are a few of Ryan’s tasteful photos:

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New Hope Mayor No Gay Marriage

In order to give you a better perspective about what’s been going on in New Hope, where I live, located in southeastern, PA where same sex marriage is still illegal in spite of the SCOTUS ruling, here are a few more links, below. For those who don’t know, Tony and I owned an art gallery in New Hope for ten years, and we’ve lived three miles away from downtown New Hope for over eleven years. Before that, we lived two miles from downtown New Hope in a town house community surrounded with gay neighbors. We’ve been together for twenty-one years and Tony is a lifelong native of Bucks County, PA. We didn’t just move here to live near cookie cutter developments because they look nice. We didn’t just move here because the schools are good. We live here because of the fact that there is a large LGBT community. What prompted that move happened while we were living in a more mainstream community about eight miles away, where an eight year old boy living next door to us asked his dad, “Why don’t we get Christmas decorations like the two fags next door.” We decided that neighborhood wasn’t for us.

New Hope has long been known as one of the most gay-friendly towns in the region, a place where rainbow flags flutter in front of boutique shops and the borough council began passing gay-rights resolutions about a decade ago, well before the recent surge nationwide.

This one is from a a web site calledAmerican Family Focus on PA Issues. They are applauding the Mayor of New Hope for refusing to marry gay couples in spite of what most legal experts claim are limited risks to him and to the town of New Hope.

Mayor Keller said that as an elected officials it was his duty to uphold the law. The AFA of PA applauds Mayor Keller’s decision to uphold the law. Even the Borough Council of State College advised their mayor, who had previously said she would perform same-sex “marriages, not to break the law.As a side note, I don’t think Mayor Keller is actually taking sides on the issue, or that he’s in any way associated with American Family Focus on PA Issues. As far as I know, and from what I’ve read, Mayor Keller supports gay marriage. He just isn’t willing to take the legal risks that may or may not be involved with marrying gay couples illegally. But I don’t think he gets points for just being for gay marriage, not as a community leader, an elected official, and someone the rest of us all look to for guidance and support. The bright, outspoken woman running against Keller this fall claims she will marry gay couples in spite of any risks involved.

2004 Marriage License Legal in NM

Unlike New Hope, PA, where I live, there have been interesting steps taken this week with regard to same sex marriage. Unlike New Hope, where the mayor of a large LGBT population has decided not to marry gay couples because he’s unwilling to take the legal risks involved and is more focused on what may or may not happen if he does, the Attorney Gen. in New Mexico claims that same sex marriage licenses issued in 2004 will remain valid and legal for now.The term he used was “presumptively valid.”

King delivered the non-binding advice in a letter to the current Sandoval County clerk, who found that some of the 2004 licenses recorded in the clerk’s office were labeled as void or invalid.King said a county clerk is responsible for issuing marriage licenses but “New Mexico law plainly does not provide county clerks with the rights to invalidate marriages.”

In her disregard for the conventions of polite society and her sexual adventurousness, Holly is something of an avatar of the liberated woman of the Sixties and Seventies, although she probably wouldn’t have approved of hippie sartorial practices, nor would she have likely appreciated the more strident male-bashing aspects of the radical wing of the feminist movement.

Truman Capote was a gay man, but not an openly gay man in the sense that he worried about equality and coming out. In his day the word gay meant happy and he was considered a homosexual, among other pejoratives. When he wrote the character of Holly Golightly it most likely came from many of his own personal experiences, because in his time, just like now, the world was owned by straight men.

I found this interesting, too.

One of the strongest endorsements of the novella came from Norman Mailer, normally the most competitive and certainly the most macho of all of Capote’s contemporaries, who wrote: “Truman Capote I do not know well, but I like him. “He is as tart as a grand aunt, but in his way he is a ballsy little guy, and he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm. I would not have changed two words of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which will become a small classic.” (Indeed, perfectionist that he was, Capote might well have placed a semicolon after the word “generation”. Capote was a master of that particular punctuation mark.)

On the surface that sounds like a compliment, but some gay men would take offense to the grand aunt reference. I know I do. As flamboyant as Capote was, he was still a man. A good deal of his career, however, was spawned as a result of his being so flamboyant, and I’m sure he knew that. Gay men have always done whatever they have to do to survive, and in some cases, if that means acting the part of a pet poodle they are not above that. I understand that, I don’t fault them for that, and I admire them for doing what they had to do to survive. I can tell you one thing for certain, if the character of Holly Golightly had been written as a gay man, the book would never have been published, Mailer would never have praised it the way he did in the quote above, and I probably wouldn’t even be writing this blog post about it.

I could ramble on with this topic for days. But the point I’m trying to make here is that when I parodied Breakfast at Tiffany’s the way I did with gay characters in The Virgin Billionaire, I was making my own statement, not trying to become the next Truman Capote. By writing the VB as an erotic romance only took that parody to another level because that’s also something Capote never would have been allowed to do during his time…books about gay men AND sex were hidden in the mattress. And there weren’t that many around in the first place. Gay men had nothing with which to identify in books or in films during Capote’s time…or any form of mainstream entertainment. So they wound up identifying with characters like Holly Golightly for lack of anything better. And Capote did do a great job of creating her, but I’ll always wonder that if he’d lived in a different time and place if he would have made her a gay man instead.

You won’t see that mentioned in the article I’ve linked to. I doubt the author, Jay McInerney, even thinks along those lines. And why should he? He never had to think that way.

Cory Booker Gay Rumors

I think this next article to which I’m linking is important for a variety of reasons. Cory Booker is a talented young politician I’ve been watching for a while now. He’s the mayor of Newark, NJ, and the things he’s done in that city to turn things around have been wonderful. I was born in Newark, NJ, and as a young child my family moved away because the city started to decay. And I never thought I would see such a huge rebound in my lifetime. No one can dispute this.

This fall Cory Booker is running for a seat in the senate, and another senate candidate, Steve Lonegan, has been throwing those proverbial darts in Booker’s direction. And the way he’s been doing this is not only shocking, it’s about as sickening as it gets with regard to what he thinks of gay men in general.

“It’s kind of weird. As a guy, I personally like being a guy. I don’t know if you saw the stories last year. They’ve been out for quite a bit about how he likes to go out at three o’clock in the morning for a manicure and a pedicure,” Lonegan, the conservative former mayor of Bogota, N.J., told Newsmax.

This comment is an indirect result of the fact that Booker does not comment on his private life or his sexual orientation at all. Booker made this statement last week.

“Because how unfair is it to a young lady to put them in the spotlight if they haven’t signed up for that yet?” he said. “And people who think I’m gay, some part of me thinks it’s wonderful. Because I want to challenge people on their homophobia. I love seeing on Twitter when someone says I’m gay, and I say, ‘So what does it matter if I am? So be it. I hope you are not voting for me because you are making the presumption that I’m straight.’”I understand what Booker is stating, and I don’t disagree with it…if Booker is NOT actually gay. I get the way the political machine works, too. But if he is gay, and he’s not disclosing that now, he’s really only adding to the shame other gay men have been experiencing all their lives, and promoting the concept that being gay does make a difference. I don’t like that. Openly gay men nowadays don’t like that. And we are tired of that brand of thinking. Mayor Koch of New York did that sort of thing all his life, and I would like to see that brand of thinking die with Koch’s generation so that future generations of gay men don’t have to worry about that “young lady” in the spotlight, and all they do have to worry about is that “young man” in the spotlight.

This actually even gets more complicated in this article, where Booker talks about how he once hated gays.

He added: “Allow me to be more direct, escaping the euphemisms of my past — I hated gays. The disgust and latent hostility I felt toward gays were subcategories of hatred, plain and simple.”Booker’s self-cleansing column seems to dispute rumors that he is a closeted homosexual. Is it possible for a man to be virulently homophobic and still be gay? One published study suggests that it is within the realm of possibility.If I were Booker, I would say something one way or the other and address the issue openly. I will never forget the day I came home from work to a news conference on TV where Gov. McGreevey of NJ said, “I am a gay American.” It was as entertaining as it was pathetic. I had seen McGreevey in person once in Lambertville, NJ, up close, during a parade. I knew he was gay the moment I looked into his eyes. And this was long before his disclosure. When he did finally decide to come out, blogs all over the web branded him Governor “McCreepy.” And I would hate to see Cory Booker turn into Senator Creeper.

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Author of over 100 published LGBT romance novels and stories, including AN OFFICER AND HIS GENTLEMAN and best selling VIRGIN BILLIONAIRE SERIES. Hates beets.
New Hope, PA Palm Springs, CA
ryan-field.blogspot.com